Related papers: The Epoch of Reionization
The study of cosmic reionization has acquired increasing significance over the last few years because of various reasons. On the observational front, we now have good quality data of different types at high redshifts (quasar absorption…
In currently popular cosmological scenarios -- all variants of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmogony -- some time beyond a redshift of 15, stars within the numerous small halos that condense with virial temperatures ~1e4 K created the first…
Cosmic dawn and the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) are among the least explored observational eras in cosmology: a time at which the first galaxies and supermassive black holes formed and reionized the cold, neutral Universe of the…
The measured properties of the epoch of reionization (EoR) show that reionization probably began around z ~ 12-15 and ended by z=6. In addition, a careful analysis of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background indicate a scattering…
The reionization of intergalactic hydrogen has received intense theoretical scrutiny over the past two decades. Here, we approach the process formally as a percolation process and phase transition. Using semi-numeric simulations, we…
We incorporate quasars into an analytic model to describe the reheating and reionization of the universe. In combination with a previous study of galaxies and Lyman-$\alpha$ clouds, we are able to provide a unified description of structure…
The rest-frame UV emission from massive stars contains a wealth of information about the physical nature and conditions of star formation in galaxies. Using studies of the rest-frame UV, the past decade has witnessed the beginning of…
We study the reionization scenario in which ionizing UV photons emitted from decaying particle, in addition to usual contributions from stars and quasars, ionize the universe. It is found that the scenario is consistent with both the first…
The first dwarf galaxies, which constitute the building blocks of the collapsed objects we find today in the Universe, had formed hundreds of millions of years after the big bang. This pedagogical review describes the early growth of their…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies represents one of the most exciting frontiers in astronomy. Since the universe was filled with hydrogen atoms at early times, the most promising probe of the epoch of…
The first generations of astrophysical objects made a substantial impact on our Universe with their radiation. X-rays from the first sources, with large mean free paths, likely quickly heated the intergalactic medium (IGM). The second…
The first galaxies to appear in the universe at redshifts z>20 created ionized bubbles in the intergalactic medium of neutral hydrogen left over from the Big-Bang. It is thought that the ionized bubbles grew with time, surrounded clusters…
It is thought that the first generations of massive stars in the Universe were an important, and quite possibly dominant, source of the ultra-violet radiation that reionized the hydrogen gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM); a state in…
The intergalactic medium - the cosmic gas that fills the great spaces between the galaxies - is affected by processes ranging from quantum fluctuations in the very early universe to radiative emission from newly-formed stars. This gives the…
In this paper we investigate how the Reionization process is affected by early galaxy formation in different cosmological scenarios. We use a semi-analytic model with suppressed initial power spectra to obtain the UV Luminosity Function in…
In this paper, we address which sources contributed most of the reionizing photons. Our argument assumes that the reionization ended around z ~ 6 and that it was a relatively quick process, i.e., that there was a non-negligible fraction of…
About half a million years after the Big Bang, the ever-fading cosmic blackbody radiation cooled below 3000 K and shifted first into the infrared and then into the radio, and the smooth baryonic plasma that filled the Universe became…
The cosmological background of ionizing radiation has been dominated by quasars once the Universe aged by ~2 billion years. At earlier times (redshifts z>3), the observed abundance of bright quasars declined sharply, implying that cosmic…
The reionization of cosmic hydrogen, left over from the big bang, increased its temperature to >~ 1.e4 K. This photo-heating resulted in an increase of the minimum mass of galaxies and hence a suppression of the cosmic star formation rate.…
This work studies the connection between the first galaxies and their hosting dark matter halos in the early Universe when Reionization is concluding. Our numerical models (already presented in an earlier study) trace the star formation…